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Critique as Counter-Hegemonic Intervention

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To approach the
question that we have been asked to examine: ‘What is critique?’, the first
move will necessarily consist in making a decision concerning the form of
critique that one is going to address. Indeed there are many different
understandings of the nature of critique and the grammars that correspond to
them are very diverse. Should we envisage the activity of critique in terms of
judgment or in terms of practice? Is it, as it is often claimed a
self-conscious activity linked to the Enlightenment and characteristic of
modernity? All those are questions that could lead to very different treatments
of the topic. Moreover, as Foucault has rightly noted, critique cannot be
defined apart from its objects and is therefore condemned to dispersion. If we
were to restrict our investigation to social criticism, this would limit the
field of possible meanings but crucial disagreements will nonetheless remain.
For instance between Habermas who argues that social criticism depends on a
form of critical theory of society - of the type of his theory of communicative
action - providing the ground for making strong normative judgments and others,
who, like Foucault, envisage criticism as a practice of resistance.

My objective here
will be very specific. I will limit myself to the field of social criticism and
more precisely still to the relation between social criticism and radical
politics. I intend to scrutinize one of the currently most fashionable views of
social criticism today, which visualizes radical politics in terms of desertion
and exodus and to contrast it with the hegemonic approach that I have been
advocating in my work. My aim is to bring to the fore the main differences
between those approaches, which one could roughly distinguish as ‘critique as
withdrawal from’ and ‘critique as engagement with’ and to show how they stem
from conflicting theoretical frameworks and understandings of the political. I
will argue that ultimately the problem with the form of radical politics
advocated by Post-Operaist thinkers like Negri and Virno is that they have a
flawed understanding of the political because they do not acknowledge the
ineradicable dimension of antagonism.

Critique as Withdrawal
From

The model of
social criticism and radical politics put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri in Empire and Multitude calls for a total break with modernity and the elaboration of a
post-modern approach. In their view such a break is required because of the crucial
transformations undergone by our societies since the last decades of the 20th
century. Those changes, which are the consequences of the process of
globalization and the transformations in the work process brought about by
workers’ struggles, can be broadly resumed in the following way:

1. Sovereignty has
taken a new form composed of a series of national and supranational organisms
united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty, which
they call ‘Empire’ has replaced the stage of imperialism that was still based
on the attempt by nation states to extend their sovereignty beyond their
borders. In contrast to what happened in the stage of imperialism, the current
Empire has no territorial centre of power and no fixed boundaries; it is a
decentered and deterritorialized apparatus of rule that progressively
incorporates the entire global realm with open, expanding frontiers.

2. This
transformation corresponds, they say, to the transformation of the capitalist
mode of production in which the role of the industrial factory labor has been
reduced and priority given to communicative, cooperative and affective labor.
In the post-modernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends
towards biopolitical production. The object of the rule of empire is social
life in its entirety; it presents the paradigmatic form of biopower.

3. We are
witnessing the passage from a ‘disciplinary society’ to a ‘society of control’
characterized by a new paradigm of power. In the disciplinary society, which
corresponds to the first phase of capitalist accumulation, command is
constructed through a diffuse network of dispositives or apparatus that produce
and regulate customs, habits and productive practices with the help of
disciplinary institutions like prisons, factory, asylum, hospital, schools and
others. The society of control in contrast is a society in which mechanisms of
command become immanent to the social field, distributed to the brains and
bodies of the citizens. The modes of social integration and exclusion are
increasingly interiorized through mechanisms that directly organize the brains
and bodies. This new paradigm of power is biopolitical in nature. What is
directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself.

4. Hardt and Negri
assert that the notions of ‘mass intellectuality’, ‘immaterial labor’ and
‘general intellect’ help us to grasp the relation between social production and
biopower. The central role previously occupied by the labor-power of mass factory
workers in the production of surplus-value is today increasingly filled by
intellectual, immaterial and communicative labor-power. The figure of
immaterial labor involved in communication, cooperation and the reproduction of
affects occupies an increasingly central position in the schema of capitalist
production.

5. Since in the
passage to postmodernity and biopolitical production, labor power has become
increasingly collective and social, a new term is needed to refer to this
collective worker, it is the ‘Multitude’. Hardt and Negri believe that the
passage to Empire opens new possibilities for the liberation of the Multitude.
They see the construction of Empire as a response to the various machines of
power and the struggles of the Multitude. Multitude, they say, called Empire
into being and globalization in so far as it operates a real
deterritorialization of the previous structures of exploitation and control is
a condition of the liberation of the Multitude. The creative forces of the
Multitude that sustain Empire are capable of constructing a counter-empire, an
alternative political organization of the global flows of exchange and
globalization, so as to reorganize them and direct them towards new ends.

At this point it
is worth introducing the work of Paolo Virno to complement the picture. Virno’s
analyses in his book Grammar of the Multitude dovetail in many respects with those of Hardt and Negri but there
are also some significant differences. For instance, he is much less sanguine
about the future. While Hardt and Negri have a messianic vision of the role of
the Multitude, which will necessarily bring down Empire and establish an
‘Absolute Democracy’, Virno sees current developments as an ambivalent
phenomenon and he acknowledges the new forms of subjection and precarization
which are typical of the Post-Fordist stage. It is true that people are not as
passive as before, but it is because they have now become active actors of
their own precarization. So instead of seeing the generalization of immaterial
labor as a type of ‘spontaneous communism’ like Hardt and Negri, Virno tends to
see Post-Fordism as a manifestation of the ‘communism of capital’. He notes
that today capitalistic initiatives orchestrate for their own benefits
precisely those material and cultural conditions which could, in other
conditions, have opened the way for a potential communist future.

When it comes to
envisaging how the Multitude could liberate itself, Virno declares that the
Post-Fordist era requires the creation of a ‘Republic of the Multitude’ by
which he understands a sphere of common affairs, which is no longer state-run.
He proposes two key terms to grasp the type of political action characteristic
of the Multitude: exodus and civil disobedience. Exodus is according to him a
fully-fledged model of political action, capable of confronting the challenges
of modern politics. It consists in a mass defection from the state aiming at
developing the publicness of Intellect outside of work and in opposition to it.
This requires the development of a non-state public sphere and a radically new
type of democracy framed in terms of the construction and experimentation of
forms of non-representative and extra-parliamentary democracy organized around
leagues, councils and soviets. The democracy of the Multitude expresses itself
in an ensemble of acting minorities which never aspire to transform themselves
into a majority and develop a power that refuses to become government. Its mode
of being is ‘acting in concert’ and while tending to dismantle the supreme
power, it is not inclined to become state in its turn. This is why civil
disobedience needs to be emancipated from the liberal tradition within which
framework it is generally located. In the case of the Multitude it does not mean
any more ignoring a specific law because it does not conform to the principles
of the constitution. This would still be a way of expressing loyalty to the
State. What should be a stake is a radical disobedience, which puts in question
the State’s very faculty of command.

With respect of
how they envisage the type of political action better suited to the liberation
of the Multitude, there is, it seems to me, no fundamental difference between
Virno and Hardt and Negri who also advocate desertion and exodus. They argue
that, since in Empire there is no more outside, the struggles must be against
in every place. This ‘being against’ is for them the key to every political
position in the world and the Multitude must recognize imperial sovereignty as
the enemy and discover adequate means of subverting its power. Whereas in the
disciplinary era sabotage was the fundamental form of resistance, they claim
that in the era of imperial control it should be desertion. It is indeed
through desertion, through the evacuation of the places of power that they
think that battles against Empire might be won. Desertion and exodus are for
them a powerful form of class struggle against imperial postmodernity.

Another important
point of agreement concerns their conception of the democracy of the Multitude.
To be sure, Virno never uses the term ‘absolute democracy’ but in both cases we
find a rejection of the model of representative democracy and the drawing of a
stark opposition between the Multitude and the People. The problem with the
notion of the people is, according to them, that it is represented in a unity,
with one will, and that it is linked to the existence of the State. The
Multitude, at the contrary, shuns political unity. It is not representable
because it is a singular multiplicity. It is an active self-organizing agent
that can never achieve the status of a juridical personage and can never
converge in a general will. It is anti-state and anti-popular. Virno, like
Hardt and Negri claims that the democracy of the Multitude cannot be conceived
any more in terms of a sovereign authority that is representative of the people
and that new forms of democracy which are non-representative are needed.

To resume, we
could say that according to this model, the activity of critique corresponds to
a form of negation, which consists in withdrawal from existing institutions.

Critique as Hegemonic
Engagement With

I will now turn to
presenting the way I envisage the form of social criticism best suited to
radical politics today. I concord with the previous writers on the need to take
account of the crucial transformations in the mode of regulation of capitalism
brought about by the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism, but I consider
that the dynamics of this transition is better apprehended within the framework
of the theory of hegemony that we have put forward in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics written jointly with
Ernesto Laclau. I agree with the importance of not seeing those transformations
as the mere consequence of technological progresses and of bringing to the fore
their political dimension. What I want to stress however is that many factors
have contributed to this transition and that it is necessary to recognize its
complex nature. My problem with the Operaist and Post-Operaist view is that, by
putting so much emphasis on the workers’s struggles, they tend to see this
transition as if it was driven by one single logic: workers’s resistance to the
process of exploitation forcing the capitalists to reorganize the process of
production and to move to Post-Fordism with its centrality of immaterial labor.
In their view, capitalism can only be reactive and they refuse to accept the
creative role played both by capital and by labor. What they deny is in fact
the role played in this transition by the hegemonic struggle and as I will
argue in a moment this is due to their immanentist ontology and their refusal
to acknowledge the political in its antagonistic dimension.

According to the
approach that I am advocating the two key concepts to address the question of
the political are ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’. On one side it is necessary to
acknowledge the dimension of the political as the ever present possibility of
antagonism and this requires, on the other side, coming to terms with the lack
of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order. This means
recognizing the hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and envisaging
society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order
in a context of contingency. The practices of articulation through which a
given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed, are
what we call ‘hegemonic practices.’ Every order is the temporary and precarious
articulation of contingent practices. Things could always have been otherwise
and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. It is
always the expression of a particular structure of power relations. What is at
a given moment accepted as the ‘natural order’, jointly with the common sense
that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is
never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that
bring it into being. Every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged
by counter-hegemonic practices which attempt to disarticulate it in order to
install another form of hegemony.

I submit that it
is necessary to introduce this hegemonic dimension when one envisages the
transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism. This means abandoning the view that
one single logic, workers’s struggles, is at work in the evolution of the work
process and acknowledging the pro-active role played by capital. In order to do
this we can find interesting insights in the work of Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello who in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism bring to light
the way in which capitalists manage to use the demands for autonomy of the new
movements that develop in the 1960ies, harnessing them in the development of
the Post-Fordist networked economy and transforming them into new forms of
control. What they call ‘artistic critique’ to refer to the aesthetic
strategies of the counter-culture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of
self-management, the anti-hierarchical exigency, were used to promote the
conditions required by the new mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the
disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period.

From my point of
view, what is interesting in this approach is that it shows how an important dimension
of the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism is a process of discursive
re-articulation of existing discourses and practices, allowing us to visualize
this transition in terms of a hegemonic intervention. To be sure Boltanski and
Chiapello never use this vocabulary but their analysis is a clear example of
what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralization’ or ‘passive revolution’
to refer to a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are
recuperated by the existing system by satisfying them in a way that neutralizes
their subversive potential. When we apprehend the transition from Fordism to
Post-Fordism within such a framework, we can understand it as a hegemonic move
by capital to re-establish its leading role and restore its challenged
legitimacy.

It is clear that,
once we envisage social reality in terms of hegemonic practices, the process of
social critique characteristic of radical politics cannot consist any more in a
withdrawal from the existing institutions but in an engagement with them in
order to disarticulate the existing discourses and practices through which the
current hegemony is established and reproduced, with the aim of constructing a
different one. Such a process I want to stress cannot merely consist in
separating the different elements whose discursive articulation is at the
origin of those practices and institutions. The second moment, the moment of
re-articulation is crucial. Otherwise we will be faced with a chaotic situation
of pure dissemination, leaving the door open for attempts of re-articulation by
non-progressive forces. Indeed we have many historical examples of situations
in which the crisis of the dominant order led to right-wing solutions. It is
therefore important that the moment of de-identification, be accompanied with a
moment of re-identification and that the critique and disarticulation of the
existing hegemony will go hand in hand with a process of rearticulation. This
is something that is missed by all approaches in terms of reification or false
consciousness which believe that it is enough to lift the weight of ideology in
order to bring about a new order, free from oppression and power. It is also
missed, albeit in a different way, by the theorists of the Multitude, who
believe that its oppositional consciousness does not require political
articulation. According to the hegemonic approach, social reality is
discursively constructed and identities are always the result of processes of
identification. It is through insertion in a manifold of practices and
languages games that specific forms of individualities are constructed. The
political has a primary structuring role because social relations are
ultimately contingent and any prevailing articulation results from an
antagonistic confrontation whose outcome is not decided in advance. What is
needed is therefore a strategy whose objective is, through a set of
counter-hegemonic interventions, to disarticulate the existing hegemony and to
establish a more progressive one thanks to a process of re-articulation of new
and old elements into different configuration of power.

Conclusion

I think that it is
important to realize that the differences between the two approaches that I
have presented stem from the very different ontologies that provide their
theoretical framework. The strategy of exodus, based on an ontology of
immanence, supposes the possibility of a redemptive leap into a society, beyond
politics and sovereignty, where the Multitude would be able to immediately rule
itself and act in concert without the need of law or the state and where
antagonism would have disappeared. The hegemonic strategy in contrast,
recognizes that antagonism is irreducible and that as a consequence social
objectivity can never be fully constituted and that, as a consequence, a fully
inclusive consensus and an absolute democracy are never available. According to
the immanentist view, the primary ontological terrain is one of multiplicity.
In many cases, it also relies on a vitalist ontology according to which the
physical and social world in its entirety is seen as the expression of some
underlying life force. In all its versions the problem with this immanentist
view is its incapacity to give account of the role of radical negativity, i.e
antagonism. To be sure negation is present in those theorists, and they even
use the term ‘antagonism’, but this negation is not envisaged as radical
negativity. It is either conceived in the mode of dialectical contradiction or
simply as a real opposition. As we have shown in Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, to be able to envisage negation in the mode of antagonism
requires a different ontological approach where the primary ontological terrain
is one of division, of failed unicity. Antagonism is not graspable in a
problematic that sees the society as a homogeneous space because this is
incompatible with the recognition of radical negativity. As Ernesto Laclau has
stressed, the two poles of antagonism are linked by a non-relational relation,
they do not belong to the same space of representation and they are essentially
heterogeneous with each other. It is out of this irreducible heterogeneity that
they emerge. In order to make room for radical negativity, we need to abandon
the immanentist idea of a homogeneous saturated social space and acknowledge
the role of heterogeneity. This requires relinquishing the idea of a society
beyond division and power, without any need for law or the state and where in
fact politics would have disappeared.

It could be argued
that the strategy of exodus is the reformulation in a different vocabulary of
the idea of communism as it was found in Marx. Indeed there are many points in
common between the views of the Post-Operaists and the traditional Marxist
conception. To be sure, for them it is not any more the proletariat but the
Multitude which is the privileged political subject but in both cases the State
is seen a monolithic apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed. It has
to ‘wither away’ in order to leave room for a reconciled society beyond law,
power and sovereignty.

If our approach
has been called ‘Post-Marxist’ it is precisely because we have challenged the
type of ontology subjacent to such a conception. By bringing to the fore the
dimension of negativity which impedes the full totalization of society, we have
put into question the very possibility of such a reconciled society. To
acknowledge the ineradicability of antagonism implies recognizing that every
form of order is necessarily a hegemonic one and that heterogeneity cannot be
eliminated; antagonistic heterogeneity points to the limits of constitution of
social objectivity. As far as politics is concerned, this means the need to
envisage it in terms of a hegemonic struggle between conflicting hegemonic
projects attempting to incarnate the universal and to define the symbolic
parameters of social life. Hegemony is obtained through the construction of
nodal points, which discursively fix the meaning of institutions and social
practices and articulate the ‘common sense’ through which a given conception of
reality is established. Such a result will always be contingent and precarious
and susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic interventions.
Politics always takes place in a field crisscrossed by antagonisms and to
envisage it as ‘acting in concert’ leads to erasing the ontological dimension
of antagonism (that I have proposed to call ‘the political’) which provides its
quasi-transcendental condition of possibility. A properly political
intervention is always one that engages with a certain aspect of the existing
hegemony in order to disarticulate/re-articulate its constitutive elements. It
can never be merely oppositional or conceived as desertion because it aims at
re-articulating the situation in a new configuration.

Another important aspect of a hegemonic politics
lies in establishing a ‘chain of equivalences’ between various demands, so as
to transform them into claims that will challenge the existing structure of
power relations. It is clear that the ensemble of democratic demands that exist
in our societies do not necessarily converge and they can even be in conflict
with each other. This is why they need to be articulated politically. What is
at stake is the creation of a common identity, a ‘we’ and this requires the
determination of a ‘they’. This again is missed by the various advocates of the
Multitude, who seem to believe that it possesses a natural unity which does not
need political articulation. According to Virno, for instance, the Multitude
has already something in common: the general intellect. His critique (shared by
Hardt and Negri) of the notion of the People as being homogeneous and expressed
in a unitary general will which does not leave room for multiplicity and is
totally misplaced when directed to the construction of the People through a
chain of equivalence. Indeed in this case we are dealing with a form of unity
that respects diversity and does not erase differences. As we have repeatedly
emphasized, a relation of equivalence does not eliminate difference- that would
be simply identity. It is only as far as democratic differences are opposed to
forces or discourses that negate all of them, that these differences can be
substituted for each other. This is why the construction of a collective will
requires defining an adversary. Such an adversary cannot be defined in broad
general terms like ‘Empire’ or for that matter ‘Capitalism’ but in terms of
nodal points of power that need to be targeted and transformed in order to
create the conditions for a new hegemony. It is a ‘war of position’ (Gramsci)
that needs to be launched in a multiplicity of sites. This can only be done by
establishing links between social movements, political parties and tradeunions.
To create, through the construction of a chain of equivalence, a collective
will, to engage with a wide range of institutions, with the aim of transforming
them, this is, in my view, the kind of critique that should inform radical
politics.